All Eyes on the Dark Portal

A few hours from when this post goes live Blizzard is expected to open the Dark Portal and let us all through and into Outland and Burning Crusade Classic.  The magic time is 3pm local for me here in California, midnight Paris time, or 22:00 UTC.

The World Wide Launch Plan

There isn’t much time left to prepare… well, there isn’t if  you plan to go through the Dark Portal at the first possible moment.  But our server was very busy over the holiday weekend, so a lot of people look to be ready to go.

Despite not being quite as far along as I thought I might more than a year and a half after WoW Classic launched, I do have three characters at level cap.  Ready to head to Outland are:

Tistann – My level 60 hunter and solo character.  He will, no doubt, be my first character through the portal and headed towards Honor Hold.  I am actually pretty happy with his progress.  In addition to being at level cap, his trade and secondary skills.

• Leatherworking – 300
• Skinning – 300
• Cooking – 300
• First Aid – 136
• Fishing – 151

He is my only character to finish maxing out his primary trade skills.  First aid he is stuck back at heavy wool bandages, which is kind of a flat spot in the training curve.  He has some remedial work to do on that front.

Wilhelm  – My level 60 paladin and now my main instance group character, he was my last to level 60, getting that last half a level after the pre-patch hit, but he is ready to go.  He is also doing pretty well on his trade skills.

• Engineering – 280
• Mining – 300
• Cooking – 300
• First Aid – 300
• Fishing – 270

Viniki – My level 60 warrior and the some time tank for the instance group.  I have to figure out what I am going to do with him.  I am actually surprised, it putting this together that his cooking isn’t at 300.  Going to have to fix that.

• Blacksmithing – 271
• Mining – 300
• Cooking – 285
• First Aid – 300
• Fishing – 121

In addition, I have one up and coming character.

Alioto – My now level 45 druid.  He was level 36 when the pre-patch hit, which put him in prime position to take advantage of the additional quests added into the game and has moved pretty quickly towards the level cap.

I had toyed with the idea of boosting him to level 58… I think Blizz tapped into the scarcity idea in that you can only buy a boost for one character in classic… back when he was just level 36.  But since the pre-patch I have enjoyed playing him enough that I am just going to level him up to 60 the old fashioned way… or, the Burning Crusade old fashioned way in any case.  He only has harvest trade skills, and those are easy to catch up.

So that is my team for the Dark Portal.  I am still half-tempted to boost a character to 58, though I suspect that is the scarcity thing playing with my head a bit.  I am not even sure who I would boost… maybe my level 21 rogue, maybe my level 25 warlock… and I am unlikely to have the time to play yet another character if my WoW Classic experience is any guide.  But my enthusiasm is high at the moment and that can lead to bad decisions.  We shall see.

And the game itself… I hope that load test was enough for them to tune up Outland.  It seemed pretty laggy in the beta, but had shaped up some once they hit the second load test.  Still, this video is probably a reasonable simulation about what is coming:

Soon.

The CSM15 Election Begins Today

The CSM15 election kicks off today.  You can go straight here to vote.  That is probably the most important part of this post, as the rest of it will be me rambling.  The voting period runs until 12:00 UTC on June 8.

Time to pick the next CSM

I wrote about the 40 candidates on the ballot when they were announced.  That post links to all of them to their official candidate forum posts and sorts them into null and non-null candidates.  CCP also has a post up with pictures and sound-bit summaries for all the candidates, which also links to their forum posts.

In an attempt to get out the vote, CCP is having another daily login event that will run concurrently with the election.

Login for more rewards

There are five daily gifts for both Omega and Alpha clones.  Alpha clones cannot vote, but at least they get a cookie.

Rewards of Democracy… and that other forever campaign

And, of course, you don’t log into the game to vote, you do that on the web site, (see the how to vote video if you need to) but if CCP gives people a prize every day with a big sign encouraging them to vote, maybe that will have some impact.  We shall see.

As for who is going to win, the shape of the promoted null sec ballots will likely dictate 6-8 seats on CSM15.  In elections, both in real life and in New Eden, large groups that can organize tend to do better than smaller groups or groups that do not organize, and null sec requires big groups and organization.  That is just the way it goes.

This makes people angry, both in the real world and in New Eden.  There are a lot of “all CCP needs to do…” ideas to work around this, most of which would be comically easy to game (Dunk Dinkle has some examples), with the very same organized groups most likely to benefit.  You want a high sec, mission running candidate for the next CSM?  Have them start organizing and campaigning now.

Writing this on Sunday afternoon and having not seen a single null sec ballot yet, I am going to double down on my predictions from about two weeks back.  Basically, nothing dramatic has come up in the campaigning cycle to change my mind, though I will admit that my level attention hasn’t gone beyond scanning headlines on /r/eve.  So my predictions remain as follows.

Hard to see how they won’t be elected:

• Gobbins – Pandemic Horde
• Innominate – Goonswarm Federation
• Merkelchen – Goonswarm Federation
• Vily – TEST Alliance Please Ignore

Very likely if they get a good ballot position:

• Alexis Finch – Brave Collective
• BlazingBunny – Northern Coalition
• UAxDEATH – Legion of xXDEATHXx

Wild cards that might make the cut if they have a big enough support base:

• Brisc Rubal – The Initiative (Has to fight the “he’s guilty!” crowd)
• ExookiZ – Initiative Mercenaries (WH support still?)
• Insidious Sainthood – RvB – BLUE Republic (RvB is pretty big)
• Maria Taylor – Fraternity (If Chinese players vote)
• Torvald Uruz – Abyssal Lurkers (Streamer/content creator people have heard of)
• Mike Azariah – The Scope (Persistence paid off in the past)

Again, that is 13 names, but the top seven seem pretty secure, so I’d declare myself successful in predicting if the remained was filled from my wild card list.

I will amend my predictions in a post script if something crazy comes up in the ballots, and I will add on any null sec ballots that get posted in the comments just to give people an idea as to who is topping which list.

Other coverage of CSM15:

• A Missioneer in Eve – Mike has a ballot list of his own to offer up
• Fuzzworks – 6 time CSM member Steve Ronuken opines
• Dunk Dinkle – On what we should look for in a CSM candidate

What Becomes of the Nintendo 3DS without Pokemon?

Earlier this week (or late last month, if you prefer) Nintendo hosted a big Pokemon press conference to talk about upcoming plans and titles for the franchise.

Press Conference 2018

This was kind of a big deal for me.

When it comes to Nintendo hardware there is really only one franchise that interested me.  I’ve played some variations on Mario and a couple of other brands, but I am really only about Pokemon.

And, from time immemorial… or at least since 1996… the core of the Pokemon franchise has lived on the Nintendo handheld hardware.  In addition to not being up on their other titles, I am also behind on consoles on every front save one; Nintendo handhelds.  I have a relatively new Nintendo that I got this past Christmas.  And I wanted it only to be sure I could play the next round of Pokemon games that would surely find their way to that platform.  After all, over on the Pokemon.com site, the icon for the video games category is literally a Nintendo handheld.

Pokemon video games are on the DS

So I watched the updates from the press conference and waited for an announcement aimed at me and my fellow handheld players.  We are, after all, the core of the Pokemon community.  They had to have something for us.

But they didn’t.  They spoke of Pokemon: Let’s Go Pikachu and Pokemon: Let’s Go Eevee for the Nintendo Switch, which sound similar, if not exactly like, core Pokemon RPG titles.  There is even a pair of them being launched together.  And they spoke of how two people could play together and how you would be able to transfer Pokemon over from Pokemon Go.

Let’s Go coming November 16, 2018

They also spoke of the whimsical and blocky looking Pokemon Quest, also for the Nintendo Switch.

Taking place on Timecube Island

And, finally, they spoke of a real core Pokemon RPG game coming to the Nintendo Switch in 2019.

Not mentioned at all was the Nintendo handheld family, which left me feeling left out of the picture.

I realize that Nintendo has been very much intent on getting everybody they can to buy a Switch.  And it has been selling pretty well.  But so has the Nintendo handheld line.  The Nintendo 2DS/3DS line has been doing okay on sales.  While they the numbers are down from the peak in 2013, they have bouncing back from their decline with 2017 beating out 2016 for units shipped and 2018 so far almost equal to 2017 sales already.  (Annual sales chart)

So what is Nintendo’s plan here?  Have handheld units been effectively abandoned?  I know that there is more to the 2DS/3DS game catalog than just Pokemon, but it is pretty much the Pokemon platform, and sales of the core Pokemon RPG games both drive and are driven by handheld unit sales.

I hope this doesn’t signal the end of the line for the Nintendo 2DS/3DS line.  The durable little dual screen handheld units have served me well for a decade now.

In Which I Return to Tyria

I was sitting around this past weekend staring at my computer, willing it to tell me what to play.  I wanted to play something, get lost in some game away from the real world, but the destination just wasn’t coming to me.

As noted, Runes of Magic lost my attention when my bag rental expired, causing an immediate inventory management crisis.  There wasn’t an op going in EVE Online and I wasn’t in the mood to rat or mine or do what amounted to more inventory management.

I fiddled with Steam for a bit and Swarm Simulator, but wasn’t really feeling it.  I was tempted for a bit to re-up for Daybreak All Access and jump on to the Agnarr server in EverQuest just to run around again. However, I know how that ends, with me not playing after a few days unless I find a regular group to run with.  Plus it was after dark and spending money online after dark is almost always a mistake.

I’d done a bit of World of Tanks recently, but that wasn’t grabbing me and I wasn’t up for the long patch process that launching War Thunder would no doubt entail.

I considered Elder Scrolls Online for a bit, they having sent me an email recently about how to solo through the game.  That seemed like something aimed at me, but that meant spending money on a game I wasn’t all that interested in outside of the fact that they sent me that email.

I was thinking about just pottering around in Minecraft, but went back to the list of installed games.

Down the list I passed Guild Wars 2.  I wasn’t even sure I remembered my account name, much less the password, but I launched it to see how long it would take to patch up.  I could keep looking while that worked away.

Still a damn fine logo

If you look at the Categories drop down on the side bar, you’ll see I made an entry for Guild Wars 2, which is about as firm a commitment as I make to a game ’round these parts.  There are even 37 posts listed under that category.  That doesn’t come close to the twelve hundred or so EVE Online posts, and is a mere tithe of even my Lord of the Rings Online posts.  37 puts it more in line with titles I take note of but haven’t really played all that much, such as Dungeons & Dragons Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea, or the late Need for Speed: World.

And even those post are merely about the game… usually me predicting that NCsoft will make ArenaNet put out an expansion due to declining revenues… rather than about playing the game.

I own the base game, which isn’t saying much since that has been available free since the Heart of Thorns expansion.  But I paid for my copy… which I guess says something.  Sucker, maybe?  Because in the almost five years since GW2 launched I have three posts from about four years ago that involve me actually in game and playing.

And yet there it was, still installed after all this time, requiring no cash outlay and with nothing else was calling to me.  So I dug out the login credential and once the patch process was complete… it zipped by pretty fast… I clicked on “play” and off I went.

I had two characters already created, both of the pseudo-human Norn race, one level 16 and one level 2.  Clearly I did not get far.  But time has moved on, I’ve changed, the world has changed, and I assumed the game probably had as well.  Still, I decided not to reinforce failure and rolled up a new character.

I figured that part of the problem with my past run might have been the race/class/zone combo, so I opted to change that up a bit.  Rather than a Norn melee class I went for a human ranger.  Ranger is never the wrong choice, is it?

I was tempted by the idea of ranged attacks and a pet, being swayed by images of the hunter class in WoW.  Having gone that route I entered the game.

Of course, I’ve forgotten most of what I ever knew about GW2, and what I knew was pretty minimal to start with.  For example, I realized after I was in the game that I couldn’t recall if I had picked a server or had even been offered a choice  Character creation seemed to be mostly about appearance and back story.  I’m a middle-class ranger whose sister ran off with her centaur boyfriend or something.  Also I have a pet bear.

The bear and I fighting a bear with another bear in the background

Later, at the character select screen, I noticed that I was tagged as being on the Henge of Denravi server, but could choose whatever world I wanted to play on.

So long as there isn’t a queue to log in, I am not sure that matters.  This is likely to be a solo affair.  But at least I think I knew what to say if somebody asks.

On entering the game I was presented with a row of wiggling icons in the lower right corner over the mini-map.  The first wanted me to please buy the Heart of Thorns expansion.  Given that my previous run into the game stopped at level 16, that seemed like a premature ask.

There was also some sort of “hey, you’re back!” reward for me, a cosmetic outfit which I put on because the starting armor included a quilted jacket that made me look like a zek from the gulag.  I chose the shiny outfit to hide that.

All shiny and ready for whatever

There was also a daily reward… because we won’t play MMOs unless we are rewarded for logging in every single day.  I’m not quite sure what I got from that daily, but I managed to make the prompt go away.

Then it was out into Queensland, the starting area for humans.  Like much of what I have seen of GW2, it was very pretty… and infested with centaurs.  I can see why my sister ended up running with that crowd, they seem to be everywhere.

My initial run at combat seemed to go as expected.  I shot the longbow I was wielding at something… a centaur most likely… then the bear would run out and grab aggro and keep the target at range while I pelted it with arrows until its health bar ran down.  Just what I wanted.  So off I went.

Have you seen my sister? Also, die!

I did see some things that were new… new to me, or forgotten by me so as to seem new… like a grand pop-up every time I made a level.

Level Three! Already?

I guess they want people to know what levels mean to them.  And I got a bag with that level, which was good because I was already sitting on a lot of drops and inventory management was looming already.

They also give you a preview of rewards to come, no doubt to entice you to keep leveling up.

Also a home version of the game and some Rice-a-roni, the San Francisco treat!

There is also the nice little arrow in the upper right that points to places of interest along with the map itself that also makes an effort to get you going in a direction where you might find some adventure.

So here I am in Guild Wars 2.  It might be a flavor of the month, the way Runes of Magic was in May.  We shall see.  I only have to get past level 16 to beat my past effort.

Scenes from the Saranen Undock

We have lost our homes.  We have been driven out of null sec.  We are hold up in the back room of a soda warehouse in a low sec system .  And yet we have not given up.  We form up around the clock.  We send fleets out into our former homes to harass and reinforce structures.

So the Moneybadger Coalition has come to Saranen to try to make us say, “uncle.”.

First it was just Pandemic Legion and NCDot.  They moved from 93PI-4 in Pure Blind to come and camp us.  They hung that Fortizar citadel on the same grid as our undock.

The Fortizar looms

Then the rest of the MBC started showing up.  More citadels were hung in space around our home station, the Quafe Company Warehouse at Saranen V, moon 9, with Darkness and Mercenary Coalition adding their own to the scene.

You can see three Fortizars on grid now

Even TEST hung one up, though they didn’t join the club fully, opting for an Astrahus directly above the station.

Key players declared war on us, so as to take station guns… which will shoot aggressors on the undock… out of the equation.

Not pictured: TEST, which was late on the scene

The MBC settled in to camp us into our station in Saranen.

Singing songs around the campfire

(image from this thread)

In their effort to defeat us, our enemy has had to become us.  As the CFC/Imperium had often been called Band of Brothers 2.0, the Moneybadgers have begun to look a bit like the CFC 2.0.  We have a coalition with overwhelming force made up of mutually blued alliances which hold the north… you have to be in denial not to see some parallel there.

Meanwhile, our groan worthy name for the conflict, the War of Sovless Aggression, had flipped meaning as well, since we are now without sovereignty and attacking those who hold it.  I didn’t like that name before, and it hasn’t aged well for me since.  I’ll stick with the Casino War, which goes back to the flash point that started the whole conflict back in January.

Over at EN24, it was announced that we were being “Hellcamped” nearly a week ago.  And then a few days later it was announced at EN24 that the siege had begun.  The MBC was going to sit on the undock in Saranen and… something.  Kill us I guess.  Make us give up, maybe?

On our side of the divide the loss of all our sovereignty has had an upside.  We have become something else as well.  As Asher Elias noted in his latest podcast, we are free to choose our fights now as opposed to being objective driven all the time.  If the enemy is out in force, we don’t give them a fight.  If they get bored and their camp of the undock dwindles… and this is why they are not the CFC 2.0, because the CFC of old didn’t get bored so easily… we undock and chase them off.

If the enemy puts an expensive bait ship on the undock, we can flash form and kill it before they can bring in their response fleet to reply.  With no objectives to defend, we get to measure our success in ISK efficiency, in causing more damage to our enemies than they do to us.  And when the enemy forms up their might to overwhelm us, we dock up again and the fight is over.

This hasn’t been ideal for everybody.  People who joined up to do null sec PvE are justifiably dissatisfied with the situation and have been leaving for greener pastures.  And I cannot imagine that the capital ship pilots are happy.  But for layabout subcap line members like myself, who barely lived in their own space when we had it and just want to fleet up and shoot things while suckling on the SRP teat, the situation has been almost ideal.  We could easily echo some of TEST’s post 6VDT-H sentiments.

Which isn’t to say that the MBC doesn’t get kills as well.  The fights are often bloody for both sides, and we generally win on ISK efficiency alone, having exchanged a pile of cheap ships for a few expensive ones.  And they own the undock when they want to and are able to pick off even those with insta-undock bookmarks with fighters now and again.

The question now seems to be who can outlast whom in this situation?

For the moment I lean towards us.  We are able to undock when we can win and get the sort of morale boosting fights that can sustain us while also keeping the supply train flowing into the station to make good our losses.  Even if we lose our citadel and the convenience that goes with it… a scenario which seems likely… we can still pick and choose our fights.

Our foes seem to have three courses going forward.

They can give up, which clearly isn’t a winning strategy.  I doubt that will seem viable to anybody in the short term, though there could be a long game possibility in it I suppose.

They can carry on as they are now and see who gets tired of this first.  That hasn’t been a winning strategy so far in Saranen, but tactics could change.  They might find their angle with the current level of effort.

Or they can try harder.

One way would be to sit on the undock with more forces more often.  Or, alternatively, they can use their economic muscle to buy up our doctrine contracts to keep us from re-shipping, denude the market in Jita of Harpies, Hurricanes, and the fittings that sustain us.  With all that IWantISK money behind them, they could starve us out by simply making everything too expensive for us.  I do not think we can out spend them head-on on that front.  The problems there are the Jita market and how much ISK it might take to conquer us via that route, especially when we can trade out doctrines.

Anyway, as I keep saying, the war goes on.  Saranen remains a busy place judging from the kill boards.  And, to go with the title, some screen shots from around the Saranen undock, including that bling fit Phoenix we got last night.